Country office immersion- an innovation mainstreaming initiative

From IFAD social reporting blog Mon Feb 4 2013, 12:54:00

As Photo Editor and Photographer for IFAD, I have had several opportunities to travel to the field over the last 16 years. What was missing from my experience was visiting an actual IFAD country office. This is why I was interested in participating in the country office immersion initiative.

I have a good understanding of how IFAD works and I have been working in the field of communication long enough to know how IFAD communicates and how the Communications Division works with the rest of the house. What I wanted to explore was how this all fits together with the country offices. How do they carry the IFAD brand in their host country? How do they communicate nationally and regionally? How do they work with IFAD headquarters? What can we offer them? What do they need from us? And the biggest question for me was, how does it feel to work in a country office

I chose to visit Viet Nam because it is a country office that was established early on, and has a track record in communications. The country office staff was very welcoming but they were a bit perplexed as to what I was actually going to do in Hanoi. Because I also wanted to take some photographs and work alongside the Communications & KM Specialist, and because the Country Director and Country Programme Officer had a busy travel schedule, I ended up with a very interesting itinerary.

I gathered photos while Lam gathered stories in the Ha Tinh province, I spent time in the office in Hanoi getting to know the staff and sharing the Communications Toolkit, and I traveled to the Mekong Delta with Henning and Tung to attend a project completion workshop for the Improving Market Participation of the Poor (IMPP) project in Tra Vinh province. There, I also worked in the field with a local knowledge management officer from the IMPP project. I got to see their knowledge share fair, attend the opening ceremony and witness how the country office staff worked with ...

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